making an impossible but necessary decision

—AS

It was 2013. We had purposefully tried and successfully gotten pregnant very quickly. I remember feeling so lucky because we didn’t have the months and months of trying and agony and let downs. Every doctor’s visit was straightforward and positive and optimistic…until our 18-week anatomy scan…. I will never forget that day. 

I will never forget the play by play, every word and every emotion, of that day. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Finding out your baby has a condition and is already beginning to show signs of distress, and likely would not survive to term or even to a viable delivery time, and if it did, the life expectancy and quality of life was not good. 

This decision we had to make: Continue on with the pregnancy and let nature take its course… could it be a week? A month? Or all the way to 9 months pregnant before we lost our baby? Or do we schedule a procedure the following week to end the pregnancy? 

No one could tell us this answer. No one has that crystal ball for the answer that I needed to help us make this agonizing decision. 

A late-term abortion is what it was called. I struggled with this so much because I wanted this baby!! We tried for this baby!!! It felt so unfair. 

I don’t speak about our “situation” in detail to anyone, because I am well aware and always far too worried of what people would think or say to me if they knew the details and the impossible but necessary decision we made. I am thankful we had the options. 

We were able to make a decision together. Me and my husband. Together. Had. The. Options. Those are the only people who have a right or a say in the choices we had to make that day. So I think about the women, in many different scenarios, who now don’t have these options I did. My heart breaks for them. Their choices and options have been taken away.